404 becoming more human by becoming more godlikecan nevertheless cultivate the imagination of forms of experience that
we renounced, as if developing the power to feel the ghostly movements
of missing limbs.
Th is power to imagine the experience that we renounced has a his-
tory entangled in the histories of the three great spiritual orientations
discussed earlier in this book. Th e religion of the future reaffi rms a
premise shared by the higher religions: the devaluation of the reality
and authority of the divisions within mankind. It gives to the devalua-
tion a more tangible meaning as a result of the importance that it as-
signs to our mastery over the structures of life and of thought. Th ose
divisions depend for their force on these structures.
A characteristic thesis of the doctrines of the overcoming of the
world is that the true foundation of sympathy lies in the unreality of
the distinct self, an idea to which Schopenhauer gave systematic ex-
pression in the history of Western philosophy. For the philosophies and
theologies of the struggle with the world, the self is not only real; it also
has unfathomable distinction and depth. Th is view represents part of
the patrimony that the religion of the future inherits from the secular
and the sacred versions of that approach to life. It is a premise of the re-
volt against belittlement and of the attempt to increase our share in the
humanly accessible attributes of the divine.
Phi los o phers like Hume, working in traditions of thought shaped by
these beliefs, nevertheless sought to base fellow feeling on the recogni-
tion of our kinship with others across the barriers separating individual
selves. In this view, sympathy depends on the existence and on the rec-
ognition of a shared nature.
Th e basis of fellow feeling, however, is at once deeper and more ac-
tive than any such nature of the species. It gains strength from the for-
mative experience of every individual person: that he might have taken
another course and become another self and that these other possibili-
ties of experience, which he renounced, are versions of a humanity in
which he might have shared. Some of these denied paths of the self may
seem inaccessible, on account of class, gender, or any number of other
traits inscribed in his body or circumstance. Nevertheless, he has been
taught by the response of imagination to mutilation that these other
humanities might also have been his, had the biological and social lot-
tery produced another result.